Can You Hide Your Online Status in WhatsApp? Sort of

WhatsApp is a very popular social networking/chat platform among people. Almost all people who use smartphones, have WhatsApp installed in their mobile phones. Now-a-days when almost all telecom companies are providing free unlimited Internet/data usage, all smartphone users keep their mobile data always ON to stay online.

This creates a big problem! If you use WhatsApp and someone sends you a message and you read the message, you can’t ignore the sender. You must have to reply to the message otherwise the sender might be angry and might complain you that you read the message but didn’t reply.

In old Instant messengers like Yahoo! or Windows Live Messenger, users could set their online status to “Invisible” so that no one can know whether they were online or not. Unfortunately WhatsApp doesn’t provide any such built-in option to remain invisible. If you are online, your contacts can see your status and can start sending you messages.

Although you can change your status to busy, in meeting, driving, etc but there are many people who will still bug you and will keep sending you messages and will bug you until you reply their messages.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could hide your online status in WhatsApp and can set your status to “Invisible”or “Offline” in WhatsApp?

There are some 3rd party apps on Internet which can overwrite default WhatsApp application and allow you to set your WhatsApp status as invisible and your contacts will never know whether you are online or not.

But these apps are not official and might be risky to install and if you worry about privacy, you should never install such kind of apps.

Today in this tutorial, I’ll tell you about a few built-in features of WhatsApp which can be used to prevent your contacts from knowing whether you have read their messages or not. It’ll make your life a little bit easier and you can say that you didn’t read the message and the sender will not receive any read receipt or last seen information.

If you are also using WhatsApp and want to hide your last seen information, following steps will help you:

1. Open WhatsApp on your mobile phone, tap on 3 vertical dots menu present at the top-right corner and select Settings option.

2. Now tap on “Accounts -> Privacy” option.

3. Under “Who can see my personal info” section, tap on “Last seen” and select “Nobody” from the given options.

4. Scroll down to bottom and also uncheck “Read receipts” checkbox.

That’s it. Now even if you read a message, the sender will never know about it and he’ll not see any blue tick on the message.

Also Check:

[Tip] How to Stop People from Adding You to WhatsApp Groups Without Your Permission?

Secret Trick to Format Messages Text Font in WhatsApp

[Tip] How to Save Your Contacts Status Images and Videos in WhatsApp